There are numerous designs for powered devices or “toys” for recreational activity on snow. For example, there are snowmobiles, which are a type of off-road vehicle designed and optimized for travel over snow. There are some designs that attempt to provide motorized power to a person on a pair of snow skis. There are also designs for providing power to a snow sled.
In any powered recreational device, it is useful for the device include features for control of the direction of the device. A nimble, easy to control recreational device will be both more fun and safer for the user of the device.
The capabilities and/or complexity of the control features are problems on many recreational snow devices. For example, some devices are linked to a motorized propulsion unit such that there is little or no flexibility or pivoting ability of the propulsion unit relative to the user platform. Yet other designs offer multiple degrees of freedom between the user platform and the propulsion device, but provides this in a relatively large, complex mechanism, and often this mechanism is accomplished by linkages that are substantially rigid. Yet other designs allow for pivotal movement of the user platform relative to the propulsion device, but do not provide any mechanism for restoring alignment of the two devices. What are needed are apparatus and methods which overcome these failings. The present design does this in a novel and unobvious way.